Quotation marks, also known as quotes, quote marks, quotemarks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks,[1][2] are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.[3]

Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.

History

The double quotation mark is older than the single. It derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. By the middle sixteenth century, printers (notably in Basel, Switzerland) had developed a typographic form of this notation, resembling the modern double quotation mark pointing to the right.[4] During the seventeenth century this treatment became specific to quoted material, and it grew common, especially in Britain, to print quotation marks (now in the modern opening and closing forms) at the beginning and end of the quotation as well as in the margin; the French usage (see under Specific language features below) is a remnant of this. In most other languages, including English, the marginal marks dropped out of use in the last years of the eighteenth century. The usage of a pair of marks, opening and closing, at the level of lower case letters was generalized.[4]

Guillemets by the Imprimerie nationale in Bulletin de l’Agence générale des colonies, № 302, May 1934, showing the usage of a pair of marks, opening and closing, at the level of lower case letters.

Clash between the apostrophe and curved quotation marks in a phrase meaning “the crimes of the ‘good Samaritans’ ”.

By the nineteenth century, the design and usage began to be specific within each region. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity pointing outward. In Britain those marks were elevated to the same height as the top of capital letters (“…”).

In France, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were modified to an angular shape and were spaced out (« … »). Some authors[5] claim that the reason for this was a practical one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from the apostrophes, the commas and the parentheses. Also, in other scripts, the angular quotation marks are distinguishable from other punctuation characters—the Greek breathing marks, the Armenian emphasis and apostrophe, the Arabic comma, decimal separator, thousands separator, etc. Other authors[5] claim that the reason for this was an aesthetic one. The elevated quotation marks created an extra white space before and after the word that was considered aesthetically unpleasing, while the in-line quotation marks helped to maintain the typographical color, since the quotation marks had the same height and were aligned with the lower case letters.[4] Nevertheless, while other languages do not insert a space between the quotation marks and the word(s), the French usage does insert them, even if it is a narrow space.

The curved quotation marks 66-99 usage (“…”) was exported to some non-Latin scripts, notably where there was some English influence, for instance in Native American scripts[6] and Indic scripts.[7] On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic took over the angular quotation marks («…»). The Far East angle bracket quotation marks (《…》) are also a development of the in-line angular quotation marks.

In Central Europe, however, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity pointing inward. The German tradition preferred the curved quotation marks, the first one at the level of the commas, the second one at the level of the apostrophes („…“). Alternatively, these marks could be angular and in-line with lower case letters, but still pointing inward (»…«). Some neighboring regions adopted the German curved marks tradition with lower–upper alignment, while others made up a variant with the closing mark pointing rightward like the opening one („…”).

Sweden (and Finland) choose a convention where both marks equally pointed to the right but lined up both at the top level (”…”).

In Eastern Europe there was a hesitation between the French tradition (less the spacing: «…») and the German tradition („…“). The French tradition prevailed in North-Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus), whereas the German tradition, or its modified version with the closing mark pointing rightward) has become dominant in South-Eastern Europe, i.e. the Balkan countries.

The single quotation marks emerged around 1800 as a means of indicating a secondary level of quotation. One could expect that the logic of using the corresponding single mark would be applied everywhere, but it was not. In some languages using the angular quotation marks, the usage of single ones (‹…›) became obsolete, being replaced by double curved ones (“…”); the single ones still survive, for instance, in Switzerland. In Eastern Europe, the curved quotation marks („…“) are used as a secondary level when the angular marks («…») are used as a primary level.

Mention in another work of a title of a short or subsidiary work, like a chapter or episode: "Encounter at Farpoint" was the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Scare quotes, used to mean "so-called" or to express irony: The "fresh" apples were full of worms.

In American writing, double quotes are used normally (the primary style). If quote marks are used inside another pair of quote marks, then single quotes are used as the secondary style. For example: "Didn't she say 'I like red best' when I asked her wine preferences?" he asked his guests.

If another set of quotes is nested, double quotes are used again, and they continue to alternate as necessary (though this is rarely done). British publishing is regarded as more flexible about whether double or single quotation marks should be used.[8] A tendency to use single quotation marks in British writing is thought to have arisen after the invention of steam-powered presses in the mid-19th century, and the consequent rise of London and New York as very separate industrialized printing centres with distinct norms.[9] However, The King's English in 1908 noted that the prevailing British practice was to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations within quotations.[10] Different media may now follow different conventions in the United Kingdom.

Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks; North American printing usually puts ending punctuation to the left of the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not, while styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.

A typewriter.

A type case.

Regarding the aspect, there are two types of quotation marks:

'…' and "…" are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, dumb, or ASCII quotation marks. The left and right marks are identical. These are found on typical English typewriters and computer keyboards, although they are sometimes automatically converted to the other type by software.

‘…’ and “…” are known as typographic, curly, curved, book, or smart quotation marks. The beginning marks are commas raised to the top of the line and rotated 180 degrees. The ending marks are commas raised to the top of the line. Curved quotation marks are used mainly in manuscript, printing and typesetting. Type cases (of any language) always have the correct quotation marks metal types for the respective language and never the vertical quotation marks metal types. Because most of the computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much typed writing has vertical quotation marks. The "smart quotes" feature in some computer software can convert vertical quotation marks to curly ones, although sometimes imperfectly.

The closing single quotation mark is identical or similar in form (depending on the font[examples needed]) to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol. The double quotation mark is identical to the ditto mark and similar to—and often used to represent—the double prime symbol. However, all of these three characters have quite different purposes.

Summary table

Other languages have similar conventions to English, but use different symbols or different placement.

There is no standard for quotation marks, and L. L. Zamenhof recommended that the writer use his native language's quotation marks.[citation needed] However, it has become common practice to use the quotation marks of American English.

Lojban uses the words lu and li’u, rather than punctuation, to surround quotes of grammatically correct Lojban.[40] Double quotes (unnamed in Lojban, but lubu suggested, following same pattern as alphabet) can also be used for aesthetic purposes. Non-Lojban text may be quoted using zoi.[41]

Machine translation like Deepl or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.

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The standard form in the preceding table is taught in schools and used in handwriting. Most large newspapers have kept these „low-high” quotation marks, but otherwise the alternative form with single or double “English-style” quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter. Neutral quotation marks (" and ') are used widely, especially in texts typed on computers and on websites.[62]

Although not generally common in Dutch any more, double angle quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. Examples include the Flemish HUMO magazine and the Metro newspaper in Brussels.[63]

German

German and English quotation marks and similar looking signs

The symbol used as the left quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria. A low quote not used in English is used for the left instead.[64] Its single quote form looks like a comma.[65]

Finnish and Swedish

In Finnish and Swedish, right quotes, called citation marks, ”...”, are used to mark both the beginning and the end of a quote. Double right-pointing angular quotes, »…», can also be used.

Alternatively, an en-dash followed by a (non-breaking) space can be used to denote the beginning of quoted speech, in which case the end of the quotation is not specifically denoted (see section Quotation dash below). A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation.

French

French uses angle quotation marks (guillemets, or duck-foot quotes), adding a quarter-em space (officially[citation needed]) (U+2005FOUR-PER-EM SPACE (HTML &#8197;)) within the quotes. However, many people now use the non-breaking space, because the difference between a non-breaking space and a four-per-em is virtually imperceptible (but also because the Unicode quarter-em space is breakable), and the quarter-em is virtually always omitted in non-Unicode fonts. Even more commonly, many people just put a normal (breaking) space between the quotation marks because the non-breaking space cannot be accessed easily from the keyboard; furthermore, many are simply not aware of this typographical refinement. Using the wrong type of space often results in a quotation mark appearing alone at the beginning of a line, since the quotation mark is treated as an independent word.

French double angle quotes (left and right), correct spacing used by typographers, with narrow (six per em) non-breaking spaces, represented on the web using narrow no-break space

«A»

French double angle quotes (left and right) without space (not recommended in French)

‹ A ›

U+2039 (8249) &lsaquo;, U+203A (8250) &rsaquo;

U+00A0 (160) &nbsp;

French single angle quotes (left and right), alternate form for embedded quotations, legacy (approximative) spacing usual on the web, with normal (four per em) no-break space (justifying, thus inappropriate)

‹ A ›

U+202F (8239) &#x202F;

French single angle quotes (left and right), alternate form for embedded quotations, correct spacing used by typographers, with narrow (six per em) non-breaking spaces, represented on the web using narrow no-break space

‹A›

French single angle quotes (left and right) without space (not recommended in French)

Initially, the French guillemet characters were not angle shaped but also used the comma (6/9) shape. They were different from English quotes because they were standing (like today's guillemets) on the baseline (like lowercase letters), and not above it (like apostrophes and English quotation marks) or hanging down from it (like commas). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this shape evolved to look like (( small parentheses )). The angle shape appeared later to increase the distinction and avoid confusions with apostrophes, commas and parentheses in handwritten manuscripts submitted to publishers. Unicode currently does not provide alternate codes for these 6/9 guillemets on the baseline, which are still considered as form variants implemented in older French typography (such as the Didot font design). Also there was not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets, with both types pointing to the right (like today's French closing guillemets).

They must be used with non-breaking spaces, preferably narrow, if available, i.e. U+202F narrow no-break space which is present in all up-to-date general-purpose fonts, but still missing in some computer fonts from the early years of Unicode, due to the belated encoding of U+202F (1999) after the flaw of not giving U+2008 punctuation space non-breakable property as it was given to the related U+2007 figure space.

Legacy support of narrow non-breakable spaces was done at rendering level only, without interoperability as provided by Unicode support. High-end renderers as found in Desktop Publishing software should therefore be able to render this space using the same glyph as the breaking thin space U+2009, handling the non-breaking property internally in the text renderer/layout engine, because line-breaking properties are never defined in fonts themselves; such renderers should also be able to infer any width of space, and make them available as application controls, as is done with justifying/non-justifying.

In old-style printed books, when quotations span multiple lines of text (including multiple paragraphs), an additional closing quotation sign is traditionally used at the beginning of each line continuing a quotation; any right-pointing guillemet at the beginning of a line does not close the current quotation. This convention has been consistently used since the beginning of the 19th century by most book printers, but is no longer in use today. Such insertion of continuation quotation marks occurred even if there is a word hyphenation break. Given this feature has been obsoleted, there is no support for automatic insertion of these continuation guillemets in HTML or CSS, nor in word-processors. Old-style typesetting is emulated by breaking up the final layout with manual line breaks, and inserting the quotation marks at line start, much like pointy brackets before quoted plain text e-mail:

In this case, when there should be two adjacent opening or closing marks, only one is written:

Il répondit : « Ce n’est qu’un « gadget ! ».

He answered: “It's only a ‘gizmo’.”

The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French and usually follows English rules, for instance in situations when the keyboard or the software context doesn't allow the use of guillemets. The French news site L'Humanité uses straight quotation marks along with angle ones.

English quotes are also used sometimes for nested quotations:

« Son “explication” n’est qu’un mensonge », s’indigna le député.

“His ‘explanation’ is just a lie”, the deputy protested.

But the most frequent convention used in printed books for nested quotations is to style them in italics. Single quotation marks are much more rarely used, and multiple levels of quotations using the same marks is often considered confusing for readers:

« Son explication n’est qu’un mensonge », s’indigna le député.

Il répondit : « Ce n’est qu’un gadget ! ».

Further, running speech does not use quotation marks beyond the first sentence, as changes in speaker are indicated by a dash, as opposed to the English use of closing and re-opening the quotation. (For other languages employing dashes, see section Quotation dash below.) The dashes may be used entirely without quotation marks as well. In general, quotation marks are extended to encompass as much speech as possible, including not just non-spoken text such as “he said” (as previously noted), but also as long as the conversion extends. However, the quotation marks end at the last spoken text, not extending to the end of paragraphs when the final part is not spoken.

According to current recommendation by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences the main Hungarian quotation marks are comma-shaped double quotation marks set on the base-line at the beginning of the quote and at apostrophe-height at the end of it for first level, reversed »French quotes« without space (the German tradition) for the second level, so the following nested quotation pattern emerges:

„Quote »inside« quote”

… and with third level:

„Quote »inside ’inside of inside’ inside« quote”

In Hungarian linguistic tradition the meaning of a word is signified by uniform (unpaired) apostrophe-shaped quotation marks:

According to current PN-83/P-55366 standard from 1983 (but not dictionaries, see below), Typesetting rules for composing Polish text (Zasady składania tekstów w języku polskim) one can use either „ordinary Polish quotes” or «French quotes» (without space) for first level, and ‚single Polish quotes’ or «French quotes» for second level, which gives three styles of nested quotes:

„Quote ‚inside’ quote”

„Quote «inside» quote”

«Quote ‚inside’ quote»

There is no space on the internal side of quote marks, with the exception of ¼ firet (~ ¼ em) space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them (e.g. ,„ and ’”).

The above rules have not changed since at least the previous BN-76/7440-02 standard from 1976 and are probably much older.

However, the part of the rules that concerns the use of guillemets conflicts with the Polish punctuation standard as given by dictionaries, including the Wielki Słownik Ortograficzny PWN recommended by the Polish Language Council. The PWN rules state:

In specific uses, guillemets also appear. Guillemet marks pointing inwards are used for highlights and in case a quotation occurs inside a quotation. Guillemet marks pointing outwards are used for definitions (mainly in scientific publications and dictionaries), as well as for enclosing spoken lines and indirect speech, especially in poetic texts.[66]

In Polish books and publications, this style for use of guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) is used almost exclusively. In addition to being standard for second level quotes, guillemet quotes are sometimes used as first level quotes in headings and titles but almost never in ordinary text in paragraphs.

Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively to quote dialogues, and is virtually the only convention used in works of fiction.

Portuguese

In Portugal, the angular quotation marks[47][52] (ex. «quote») are traditionally used. They are the Latin tradition quotation marks, used normally by typographers. It is that also the chosen representation for displaying quotation marks in reference sources,[51][67][68] and it is also the chosen representation from some sites dedicated to the Portuguese Language.[69]

The Código de Redação[70] for Portuguese-language documents published in the European Union prescribes three levels of quotation marks representation («…“…‘…’…”…»):

And it was written “Someone asked ‘Who shouted ‘My God’!’?”. in the sheet of paper.

in black: main sentence which contains the citations;

in green: 1st level citation;

in red: 2nd level citation;

in blue: 3rd level citation;

However, the usage of English-style (ex. “quote” and ‘quote’) marks is growing in Portugal.[48][better source needed] That is probably due to the omnipresence of the English language and to the corresponding inability of some machines (mobile phones, cash registers, specific printers, calculators, etc.) to display the angular quotation marks.

In Brazil, however, the usage of angular quotation marks is little known, being used almost solely the curved quotation marks (“quote” and ‘quote’). This can be verified, for instance, in the difference between a Portuguese keyboard (which possesses a specific key for « and for ») and a Brazilian keyboard.

Machine translation like Deepl or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.

You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary (using German): Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Exact name of German article]]; see its history for attribution.

You should also add the template {{Translated|ru|Прямая речь}} to the talk page.

In Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, angled quotation marks are used without spaces. In case of quoted material inside a quotation, rules[71] and most noted style manuals prescribe the use of different kinds of quotation marks. However, some of them[72] allow to use the same quotation marks for quoted material inside a quotation, and if inner and outer quotation marks fall together, then one of them should be omitted.

Right:

Пушкин писал Дельвигу: «Жду „Цыганов“ и тотчас тисну».

(Pushkin wrote to Delvig: “Waiting for ‘Gypsies’, and publish at once.")

Permissible, when it is technically impossible to use different quotation marks:

Spanish

“This is an example of how a literal quotation is usually written in Spanish.”

And, when quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation, the system is:[73]

«Antonio me dijo: “Vaya ‘cacharro’ que se ha comprado Julián”».

“Antonio told me, ‘What a piece of “junk” Julián has purchased for himself’.”

The use of English quotation marks is increasing in Spanish,[citation needed] and the El País style guide, which is widely followed in Spain, recommends them. Hispanic Americans often use them, owing to influence from the United States.

This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.[61]James Joyce always insisted on this style, although his publishers did not always respect his preference. Alan Paton used this style in Cry, the Beloved Country (and no quotation marks at all in some of his later work). Charles Frazier used this style for his novel Cold Mountain as well. Details for individual languages are given above.

The dash is often combined with ordinary quotation marks. For example, in French, a guillemet may be used to initiate running speech, with each change in speaker indicated by a dash, and a closing guillemet to mark the end of the quotation.

Dashes are also used in many modern Englishnovels, especially those written in non-standard dialects. Some examples include:

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, in which spoken dialogues are written with the typical English quotation marks, but dialogues imagined by the main character (which feature prominently) are written with quotation dashes

In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian the reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is separated with two additional dashes (also note that the initial quotation dash is followed by a single whitespace character as well as the fact that the additional quotation dashes for the middle main clause after the initial quotation dash are all with a single whitespace character on both of their sides):

“You don't seem to be anything special,” said Korkala almost sadly, “but there's no help to it.”

— Frakki, älähti Huikari. — Missä on frakki?

— Räätälissä, sanoi Joonas rauhallisesti.

“Tailcoat”, yelped Huikari. “Where is the tailcoat?”

“At the tailor's”, said Joonas calmly.

The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015―HORIZONTAL BAR to be used as a quotation dash. In general it is the same length as an em-dash, and so this is often used instead. The main difference between them is that at least some software will insert a line break after an em dash, but not after a quotation dash. Both are displayed in the following table.

Electronic documents

Typewriters and early computers

"Ambidextrous" quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. Some computer systems designed in the past had character sets with proper opening and closing quotes. However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only contains a straight single quote (U+0027'APOSTROPHE) and double quote (U+0022"QUOTATION MARK).

Many systems, such as the personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):

”Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.

’Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

These same systems often drew the grave accent (`, U+0060) as an open quote glyph (actually a high-reversed-9 glyph, to preserve some usability as a grave). Thus, using a grave accent instead of a quotation mark as the opening quote gave a proper appearance of single quotes at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look like the following:

‛‛Good morning, Dave,’’ said HAL.

‛Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

The typesetting application TeX uses this convention for input files. The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly quotation marks.

``Good morning, Dave,'' said HAL.

`Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

The Unicode slanted/curved quotes described below are shown here for comparison:

“Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.

‘Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

Keyboard layouts

Typographical quotation marks are almost absent on keyboards.

In typewriter keyboards, the curved quotation marks were not implemented. Instead, to save space, the straight quotation marks were invented as a compromise. Even in countries that did not use curved quotation marks, angular quotation marks were not implemented either.

Computer keyboards followed the steps of typewriter keyboards. Most computer keyboards do not have specific keys for curved quotation marks or angled quotation marks. This may also have to do with computer character sets:

IBM character sets generally do not have curved quotation mark characters, therefore, keys for the correct quotation marks are absent in most IBM computer keyboards.[76]

Microsoft followed the example of IBM in its character set and keyboard design. Curved quotation marks were implemented later in Windows character sets, but most Microsoft computer keyboards[77] do not have a dedicated key for the correct quotation mark characters. On keyboards with the Alt Gr key, they are accessible through a series of keystrokes that involve this key. Also, techniques using their Unicode code points are available; see Unicode input.

Macintosh character sets have always had the correct quotation marks. Nevertheless, these are mostly accessible through a series of keystrokes, involving the ⌥ Opt key.

In languages that use the curved “…” quotation marks, they are available[r] in:

none

In languages that use the angular «…» quotation marks, they are available[r] in:

In languages that use the curved ”…” quotation marks, they are available[r] in:

none

Curved quotes within and across applications

Historically, support for curved quotes was a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them.
To use non ASCII characters in e-mail and on Usenet the sending mail application generally needs to set a MIME type specifying the encoding. In most cases (the exceptions being if UTF-7 is used or if the 8BITMIME extension is present), this also requires the use of a content-transfer encoding. (Mozilla Thunderbird, however, allows insertion of HTML code such as &lsquo; and &rdquo; to produce typographic quotation marks; see below.)

The term smart quotes (“…”) is from the name in several word processors of a function aimed this problem: automatically converting straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes, the feature attempts to be "smart" enough to determine whether the punctuation marked opening or closing. Since curved quotes are the typographically correct ones, word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users (at minimum as available characters). Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using. The character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, while ISO 8859-1 (historically the default character set for the Unixes and older Linux systems) has no curved quotes, making cross-platform and -application compatibility difficult.

Performance by these "smart quotes" features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits). As many word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) have the function enabled by default, users may not have realized that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something different (conversely users could incorrectly assume its functioning in other applications, e.g. composing emails).

The curved apostrophe is the same character as the closing single quote.[93] "Smart quotes" features, however, wrongly convert initial apostrophes (as in 'tis, 'em, 'til, and '89) into opening single quotes. (An example of this error appears in the advertisements for the television show 'Til Death). The two very different functions of this character can cause confusion, particularly in British styles,[t] in which single quotes are the standard primary.

Unicode support has since become the norm for operating systems. Thus, in at least some cases, transferring content containing curved quotes (or any other non-ASCII characters) from a word processor to another application or platform has been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) are Unicode-aware. But there are still applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur.

There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can cause difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding. For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as "garbage." HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes: &lsquo; (left single), &rsquo; (right single or apostrophe), &sbquo; (low 9 single), &ldquo; (left double), &rdquo; (right double), and &bdquo; (low 9 double). XML does not define these by default, but specifications based on it can do so, and XHTML does. In addition, while the HTML 4, XHTML and XML specifications allow specifying numeric character references in either hexadecimal or decimal, SGML and older versions of HTML (and many old implementations) only support decimal references. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use &#8220; and &#8221;, and to represent single curly quotes use &#8216; and &#8217;. Both numeric and named references function correctly in almost every modern browser. While using numeric references can make a page more compatible with outdated browsers, using named references are safer for systems that handle multiple character encodings (i.e. RSS aggregators and search results).

Usenet and email

The style of quoting known as Usenet quoting uses the greater-than sign (>) prepended to a line of text to mark it as a quote. This convention was later standardized in RFC 3676, and is now used by email clients when automatically including quoted text from previous messages (in plain text mode).

Unicode code point table

In Unicode, 30 characters are marked Quotation Mark=Yes by character property.[94] They all have general category "Punctuation", and a subcategory Open, Close, Initial, Final or Other (Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po).

^ abThese forms are rotated for use in horizontal text; they were originally written ﹁…﹂ and ﹃…﹄ in vertical text

^ abcWithin a quotation, the opening quotation mark is repeated at the beginning of each new paragraph.

^ abUsage may vary, depending on the native language of the author and publisher.

^According to the French Imprimerie nationale. English quotes are more common on the second level, though.

^According to French usage in print and the practice of the French Imprimerie nationale. A rule in the house style guide recommends NBSP, though.

^According to a rule in the house style guide of the French Imprimerie nationale. Practice in the style guide and elsewhere shows use of NNBSP, though. Also used in word processing, where NBSP is not justifying, though (except in Word 2013, according to this forum thread).

^According to French usage. The French Imprimerie nationale recommends double angle quotes even on the second level, though.

^ abThese codes for vertical-writing characters are for presentation forms in the Unicode CJK compatibility forms section. Typical documents use normative character codes which are shown for the horizontal writing in this table, and applications are usually responsible to render correct forms depending on the writing direction used.

^ abcdefin 1st or 2nd level access, i.e., specific key or using the ⇧ Shift key; not 3rd or 4th level access, i.e., using Alt Gr key or ⌥ Opt key, in conjunction or not with the ⇧ Shift key.